This decade has been a great one for sports in India, as we saw the rise of many youngsters, the rise of the Indian Football Team, a new cricket team and also, many sporting clubs in various sports, especially in the field of Motorsports as the popularity of it is increasing gradually in India.
So let’s have a look at the sportsperson of the decade in motorsports.
Gaurav Gill
India’s one of the best-known faces in the car rallying world is Gaurav Gill, who by winning the FIA Asia Pacific Rally Championship (APRC) in 2013 established himself on the international stage. He repeated the victory in 2016 and 2017 driving in the Indian outfit, with Team MRF.
He also tried his hands at the WRC 2 category, one rung below the elite level of rallying. He completed the National Road Racing Championship as second, in 2003 before he went for better the following year. In 2019, he was bestowed with the honour of being the first motorsports athlete to be awarded the Arjuna Award for his national and APRC performances.
K. P. Aravind
Aravind is another rider from Bengaluru, who followed the footsteps of C.S. Santhosh and has become a regular at the Dakar Rally. He is the second Indian to complete the rally and took the overall 39th rank in the 2019 edition of the championship.
Aravind has won a whopping number of 17 National titles, in addition with victory at the gruelling Raid De Himalaya too in 2015. Santhosh and Aravind are inspirations to the new crop of off-roaders, who have been competing in some of the toughest rallies across the world. The riders get support from the corporate like Hero Motors and TVS Racing, which have already fielded factory teams at these prestigious events.
Narain Karthikeyan
Narain is the first Indian to race in Formula 1 when he drove for Jordon GP in the 2005 season. He made a return to the F1 grid after a break of six years and competed in nine races for Hispania Racing in 2011.
Later in that same year, he was bestowed with the distinction of being the only Indian driver to line up for the country’s inaugural Formula One race at the Buddh International Circuit. The racer from Coimbatore tightened his seatbelts for the team, renamed as HRT, the following season too though he failed to clinch any points in both the years. Since then, he has made a career in competing in the Super Formula and Super GT categories, in Japan.
